MaNan FF: Colliding Forces (Chapter 2C Updated 24 July'18 Page:4) - Page 3

Chapter 2C: Shenanigans of Black Spectre

SCENE 1

LOCATION: IMAGICA 

TIME: 11:00 A.M.

Manik's Pov

Music is the dreams of the soul. The time when our soul closes its eyes and drifts somewhere into the clouds. I can picture the bizarre scene where our souls gasp for air, dumbfounded when the lyrics of the symphony can speak the words they fail to say.

The epilogue of the song bewitching them to fall into an absolute abyss and the soul awakens, unaware of the surroundings, lost in the music of its imaginations, brimming with the abstracts of emotions.

Music is the lullaby of my soul and even the stranger gauged the wild passions and cravings of music desired by my soul.

It is as though music is soothing my soul, rocking me back and forth, shushing my umpteen sobs, drinking my tears.

Music does calm me down. It did calm me down.

I closed my eyes shut, constraining my brain to rewind and replay the song in my head. Still ragged for breath.

The stranger beside me reached towards me and rubbed my back. Her long satiny and fleecy hair acting as a hindrance for my eyes.

In the dark, I could not gauge the color of her hair but I would hazard a guess that they were somewhere dancing between browns and blacks.

"Hey, it is okay," her voice as soft as though a satin fabric was slithering down her throat.

Although her voice was soft, her tone was firm. As though, she wasn't reassuring me, she was merely stating a fact.

Maybe she knew.

Maybe she has suffered.

Maybe she has seen someone suffering.

I hope I am okay.

I hope. I hope. I hope.

She retrieved to her seat.

I sighed, my breath regulating at a slow pace.

Alas! Hope is the most addicting drug of all.

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The panic in my abdomen which felt like a cluster of spark plugs began to subside.

My heart which was earlier hammering inside my chest like it belonged to a rabbit running for its skin, started to throb at a normal pace as though, the rabbit had finally reached to its safety.

The panic had condensed but not vanished. I was trying to distract myself as much as possible.

"Hey! Are you alright now?" The girl questioned me with a certain concern in her voice.

I am scared.

I am clueless.

I am terrified.

"I am fine," I am also good at camouflaging my scars.

"Do you know 90 percent of the time fine doesn't mean fine. Fine is a big obnoxious illusion. The scale goes from great, good, okay, not okay, I hate you, fine.

"So, where are you on the scale?" Her voice sounded as though she was concerned for me but her tone was also sprinkled by curiosity.

"Really, I am fine," I replied without exhibiting emotions in my voice. She was a freaking psychic.

"Tell me you're going to die. Tell me the sun is going to explode. Tell me the world is ending and I can do nothing about it because if I hear that you're fine one more time, I will scream," her tone was overflowing with bitterness layered by roughness.

She cursed not-so-quietly in a South Indian language. Tamil or Malayali would be my best guess.

I couldn't understand her words, and could only know they were curse words for the taut tone of her voice because the words sounded strangely melodic. They were sweet but venomous, like cupcakes sprinkled with poison.

A f**king stranger is physically and mentally forcing me to shed all my sheets of safety.

Unknowingly tormenting me to disclose my scars which for a very long period of time have been transformed into some enigmatic tattoos with my blood, sweat, and tears.

I have never felt so needy and so helpless in one lone moment.

This feeling is overwhelming and underwhelming at the same time, literally and metaphorically.

"First of all, will you cease murdering me in your ephemeral daydreams? Second of all, will you stop brainstorming creative and hazardous ideas to commit a mass killing?

"Third of all, will you cease embracing nasty apocalypse schemes? Fourth of all, why do you need to know whether I am okay or not okay?" I ranted.

Yes, I, The Manik Malhotra deliver a tirade to a f**king stranger whom I couldn't even see in this Stygian Circle of Hell.

The girl who was so obstinate to shred my masquerade.

My heart was dancing to whisper the truth. But I could never whisper because my voice always had a million reasons to shout. The shouts which were tormenting my languid brain.

"You're not okay," she stated with a cold authority. Never in a million years, I could deny this bare, naked truth.

"I am not okay," I reiterated the aforementioned fact.

I let out the whisper.

They were just four paltry words yet they were overflowing with an astonishing array of emotions. Emotions I was afraid to show to any living organism.

"I know," she said.

"But sometimes it is okay not to be okay. It is okay to be afraid, to be sensitive, to be clueless, to be terrified, to be vulnerable. This does not make you weak, it makes you human. Sometimes it is okay not to be okay because you have been strong for too long," she said in a tone of conciliation.

My eyes widened in the dark.

I anticipated a long extensive talk from a stranger about maintaining a positive perspective in life, about surviving the storms and being brave and blah, blah, blah.

Don't blame me Mr. Subconscious. Didn't all the cliche books had the stranger with a 20-page monologue about this facade?

This occurrence was generally whilst the period when the protagonist was going to commit suicide, after receiving shit grades, a mammoth fight with their parents and exasperatingly sad heartbreak.

Strangely, I found comfort in her words. Maybe it is okay not to be okay.

"Besides," she spoke after an extensive pause. I could sense a timbre of cheerful amusement in her tone, "we need to be not okay otherwise, chocolates, ice-creams music, books, loads and loads of books will wrestle with an existential crisis."

A slow grin spread over my face, unhurried as though my cheekbones were penetrating her humor in their cells.

An unruffled smile made way to my cheeks it was as though the freckled crescent unwraps slowly from the camouflaging clouds after a torrential downpour in the midnight. The time when the atmosphere is fragmented with the ambrosial fusion of night-blooming jasmine and the petrichor.

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The panic is rising again like a phoenix does from the ashes.

Adrenaline is lumping back in my throat. The darkness is starting to consume me again as though I am flying in a plane around the Bermuda triangle.

Wait for me to come home

Wait for me to come home

Wait for me to come home

I am chanting the lyrics of her song but in vain. I feel my ribs heaving as if bound by ropes, straining to inflate my lungs. My head is a carousel of fears spinning out of control, each one pushing my mind into blackness. I want to run; I need to freeze.

Distract yourself, Manik.

Don't think about it.

You're breathing. Converse with the girl.

Don't think about it.

Don't think about it.

Calm down.

I hope. I hope. I hope.

I closed my eyes and set my neurons on fire. Brainstorming any conversation starters.

After a certain amount of minutes, spend on music, a sardonic grin spread over my face, hurried and hasty, my mind was tumbling with a bag of ideas. It was as though the neurons have brought back my phase of a crazy bookworm.

"Do you regularly have these philosophical and cheerful conversations with strangers or am I product of your psychosis?" My facial expressions were hop-scotching between a smirk and a chuckle. It was an absurd expression.

"No, you're a bizarre exception and I do not wish to have you as a product of my psychosis.

"But I guess I would rather like unburdening the nightmares that you found tangled in your dreamcatcher this awful morning than drown in my schizophrenic universe with a myriad of tales about your Narcissist Personality Disorder," she replied with sudden fierceness.

"Unburdening the nightmares which are tangled in my dreamcatcher?" I sneered.

"Girl, do you realize in our previous lives I could be the infamous and brutal serial killer called the Black Spectre whose terminal objective in his life was to brutally murder Seren, the princess of the Welsh kingdom to seek his revenge from the king.

"Surprise, surprise, you're the Welsh princess, Seren and I am Black Spectre who reincarnates to accomplish his mission as the prophecy foretold him by a specialist clairvoyant," A motion of hazy imaginations were revolving around my mind as I was cooking up a story.

Hopefully, this reduces my anxiety and the girl doesn't get frightened. I hope she understands why I am trying to divert my mind.

Nandini's Pov

Distraction.

I exhaled aloud. I believe such phobias anticipate people to welcome distractions.

How courageous it is that people try to eradicate their fear! Forgetting that fear is part of being human. It's the precursor to bravery. We need fear, it wakes us up to what needs to be done. We need to feel it, own it, let it ignite our thoughts.

I guess I should play along to not create an awkward situation for this person. God knows, how I aided him to embrace fear.

At any cost, I do not desire to see his demeanor. Even little children desperately waiting for the commencement of this bloody ride can sense his "I am scared"demeanor in the dark.

Besides, his story-telling skills are remarkable. It can be the cause of my amusement for another ten minutes

"Okay, first of all, you read a lot of books," I said.

"Damn right, I do," he commented instantly as though he was waiting for the comeback since he transformed into a passionate bookworm.

"Second of all, Black Spectre? You call yourself Black Spectre?" I questioned him about the origin of that nickname. What was he in his previous life, a sexually hungry middle-aged phantom.

"Yeah, I wanted to go by Dementor, but that would be copyright infringement," he had a timbre of a scornful voice.

"Well, expecto patronum then. However, let me complete my third and last question, why a princess? I don't want to look like a princess even in my previous life. I want to look like a formerly evil queen who reluctantly redeemed herself for the side of the good," I said.

"You read too much!" he reiterated my phrase.

"Damn right, I do," I reiterated his and we bust into specks of laughter.

SCENE 2

LOCATION: IMAGICA

TIME: 11:15 A.M.

Nandini's Pov

Silence engulfed our surroundings for a few moments. I could here the loud critical comments of the people stuck in their chair-cars. Some people were asking the staff for the doors to opened. Cacophony and chaos was dancing in every nook and every corner of the room.

"Why Seren?" I questioned him.

"Seren?" He asked again.

"Does your Narcissistic Personality Disorders have an overlapping symptom of Alzheimer's? Seren? The victim of Black Spectre. The princess of Welsh Kingdom," Reminiscing him about the story of apparently our adventurous, mad and agonized previous life.

"Why don't you like it?" He asked me, clearly expressing his admiration for the word.

"Pfft! No! It is like a camel spit to the neurons of creativity. It is a word that is actually making my neurons nauseous with an unknown level of mental dysentery.

"I would rather prefer the name, Matilda. It is a gorgeous and a powerful name. Seren sounds like a couch potato baby bird exasperating the mother bird with its rasping voice.," I ranted.

I should really consider disclosing my mad-hatter imaginations to a stranger. But I don't ever consider. Perhaps I do not possess the voice, the one that tells you not to say the things that are wrong.

"Star," his voice sounded like he was talking about his deepest passions, crazy ambitions, and wild sensations. Maybe stars were special to him. He spoke as though his eyes had started smiling and his breathing has deepened a little.

Stars. I inhaled a deep puff of air. Traumatic recollections devoured every cell of my body. With years of practice, I pushed the faded images out of my mind,

"Seren is a popular Welsh name that means a star," he elucidated his knowledge about the name.

"Star is just a huge ball of gas held together by one of the few known sorceries called gravity," I snorted.

"Just because they're far-fetched and release some light energy miles away doesn't make them unique."

"Arre! Stars he toh hai. Problem kya hai? In fact, I like them. They are the brightest magic of the cosmos. Stars light the sky like snow-flakes in the night, appearing, like an old photograph.

"These stars na they tell us tales, tales of great angels and dragons, of times of war and times of peace, of death and life. When they stretch across the endless sea of sorrows, a million spangled glimmers of hope pierces through the veil of the night sky, like the eyes of angels in the distant darkness. They strive for light in the world so dark.

His words fall through the air like confetti, their transient beauty drawing me closer.

For a moment I felt unguarded. I pause, trying to overcome the power of words he uttered.

Only if he knew, that light transforms into the fire. The fire that is a catastrophe of ripping families and mutating living organisms.

"I have a conflicting belief. I hate, loathe, detest and despise stars," I told him, reminiscing about the past.

"You don't say," his tone was dripping with disbelief.

"I do. Maybe because as a science enthusiast I realize that when light transforms into a fire, it has the palpable power to engulf everything, light or dark, good or evil and spit it into the radiations of photons," I told him, knowingly unveiling the secrets in an enigma.

"I believe fireflies usse jyada ache hote hai. The prove about the bizarre creations by the cosmos. The time when a thick dark canvas blankets the atmosphere, the quick flicker and crackle of light, too fast for the naked eye.

"Suddenly the soft warm glow of the firefly slicing through the dark atmosphere with its sugary light. That's the light that brings joy. That joy dances in a heady swarm of light, like a frozen firework explosion. It is a magic that doesn't cause harm," I was overwhelmed by the emotions.

"We may have a vast difference of opinion. However, I admire your views. Tell me something, you aren't from Mumbai, are you?" He asked me, somewhere he knew the answer.

"Fortunately, not," I chuckled and the speaker erupted.

"Your rides will be starting in the next 5 minutes, please come ahead to the front row chair-cars for the best experience," the male voice from the speaker announced.

The chair-cars which were completely occupied were empty now as many people left in exasperation and letting out some colorful words at the management.

I decided to occupy the front-seat, leaving the stranger alone so that we actually remain the blind strangers. My decision was based on the fear that if I may come across this person, we both are not embarrassed to death.

Maybe strangers remain, strangers, till they don't see each other.

"So, this is it then, I guess," I turned towards him, the room was still dark, however, he seemed calm.

"I am occupying the front-seat and I truly hope you start believing that it is okay not to be okay. Share your fears with your loved ones," My tone was resolute.

"Thank you so much, umm... Matilda," his voice was filled with gratitude, "You are one of those girls that are intelligent and caring. You have a euphonious voice. Thank you for calming me down.

"Black Spectre was not so kind in the previous life," I rolled my eyes. He chuckled.

"I am comfortable sitting here and I truly hope you start believing in stars. I reciprocate the advice to share your fears with your loved ones, Matilda," He spoke in a concerning voice.

"Are you Mr. Narcissist Personality Disorder?" I questioned him in disbelief. He laughed aloud.

"Goodbye, Black Spectre," I finally bid my adieu because the ride would be starting soon and the staff member was nagging people who were searching for places in the absolute dark.

"Goodbye, Matilda," his voice had a timbre of amusement.

I occupied the front row.

A loud screeching noise erupted in the room, a jerk pushed my chair-car backward. As realization dawned, the adrenaline started flooding my system like it's on an intravenous drip - right into my blood at full pelt.

My heart will explode and I feel my eyes wide, letting in every ounce of the fading light. My body wants to either run fast for the hills or work to find weaponry, but instead, I stay right where I am. Sometimes freezing is the best of the choices.

Outer Space, here I come.

But first, some rebellion with the stars.

Manik's Pov

Adrenaline is activating my sympathetic nervous system, making my heart beat faster, diverting blood to my muscles and away from my gut. Flight or fight right? Well, all I know is that I love it. I'm addicted to it. It's my drug of choice.

Stars, here I come.

Not just as Manik Malhotra, the star lover but as Manik Malhotra, the star lover who is enlightened by fireflies.

I smug at myself.  

They say love is a rollercoaster ride, who knew love will start on a rollercoaster ride.

Hello my MaNan Maniacs!

How was MaNan first conversation?

Tell me about your favourite lines from this chapter?

What about Black Spectre and Matilda?

Disclaimer: Imagica is used in purely fictitious manner. All views, opinions, and descriptions are purely imaginative and not for harming a particular caste, class, gender, religion or any individual.

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Arcane